Usually when you hear about “March Madness” it refers to the NCAA College Basketball season coming to a climax and end. This year my attentions have been so diverted that I find myself today, the first day of the championship, not really knowing who’s playing who. Unbelievable!
Since the beginning of the month here in Greene County we have had three major weather events resulting in school closings. The latest was this past Sunday night which coincided with our parish St. Patty’s Day Dinner where we fed almost 125 folks all the corned beef, cabbage, ham, potatoes, carrots, salad and desserts they could eat. Our youth group waited tables while the grown-ups cooked and plated the food, supervised and after the last diner left, began the clean-up.
I have to admit that everything pretty much ran like clockwork up until the clean-up. After Mass, several of us met up in the hall and with our church clothes protected by aprons and armed with vegetable peelers, we peeled fifty pounds of potatoes and a huge pile of carrots while other quartered massive quantities of cabbage and onions. Enormous pots were set to boil on the big black commercial range and the first of the seventeen briskets began to simmer. Given the size of the kitchen, it was a herculean accomplishment to prepare this meal on such a scale.
By eleven-thirty, the food was prepped, tables in the dining room were arranged and set with bright Kelly green table clothes and festive St. Patty’s Day placemats and napkins. Irish pub music filled the room. We were ready except for the finishing touches.
The chief chef was an older woman who is a professional caterer. She single-handedly supervised the crew of volunteers and brought order to our piles of peeled vegetables. After a couple of hours, she sent everyone home, insisting she was perfectly capable and willing to sit with the pots for a few hours. Having been trained since my youth to always be ready to help out in the kitchen, I found it difficult to tear myself away. I did go home for a few hours, to change and grab a snack but was soon back in the kitchen, helping where I could.
At four-thirty our guests began to arrive. By five-thirty, over sixty dinners had been served. If you haven’t been to our tiny church, that might not seem impressive, but believe me, considering our hall only seats comfortably about eighty folks, and the fact that the weather was already showing signs of ugliness, it was a pretty big deal. By seven, the dinner was over, except for the clean-up.
The tables were cleared and the dinning room was swept and returned to normal in a few moments by the remaining youth and their parents. Left overs were wrapped and divided and stowed in the refrigerator. All that remained was a stack of large pots, chafing dishes, serving dishes and flatware. Under usual circumstances, we would have run most of the small things through a couple of cycles in the dishwasher. Unfortunately our dishwasher had been removed a couple of weeks ago in preparation for a new super fast commercial grade dishwasher that hadn’t arrived in time for the dinner. Having to wash all those dinners by hand wouldn’t have even been so bad had we had a good supply of hot water and enough dish washing liquid and Brillo pads to tackle the job. Necessity being the mother of invention, we collectively soon discovered we could make as much hot water as needed a quart at a time by running it through our Bunn coffee maker. Someone ran home for a bottle of Dawn and we were back on track. We even created a make-shift dish drainer by putting the top rack from the old dishwasher over a large baking sheet.
Two hours later, the flatware and most of the smaller serving dishes were clean, dried and put away leaving only the biggest, greasiest, burnt on dirtiest of pots and the floor to finish. Outside, the snow continued to fall. It’s not hard to imagine just how tired we all were. Most of us had been on our feet for four to five hours. We were pooped and our feet hurt; at least mine did. So, we did what sensible people do. We loaded the remaining pots into our cars to wash at home, agreeing to return on Tuesday (since Monday was going to be a snow day).
By the time I got home, all I wanted to do was throw myself on the couch and put my feet up and that’s exactly what I did. Across the room I heard Dave begin to fill me in about the bracket alignment for “The Dance”. In past years I’d fuss about who got in and who got snubbed and why one team rated a one or two seed and another a five or six. This year, I was too tired to care.
Monday was indeed another snow day. Tuesday we brought back our cleaned pots and finished cleaning the kitchen at church. Wednesday I got a call telling me that one of our parishioners had passed away and asking could I help out at the reception on Friday afternoon. Ahhhh. (Heavy sigh.) March madness takes many forms. But this morning, I discovered my daffodils were blooming for the first time. Beauty exists even in the whirlwind.
If the sprouts in the garden are any indication, I will have many opportunities to “vacation” from the pace of the days and months to come as the seasons turn from Spring and then to Summer and “The Wedding” approaches. I do appreciate my mini visits with creation and am forever grateful that I don’t have to look much further than my own back door.